Modern telecommunication devices are required to manage large amounts of communication channels. This management process includes processing information frames (or packets) according to one or more telecommunication protocols. Some of these stages are referred to as framing. Various framers are known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,178 of Arato et al., titled “System and method for data alignment in a communication system” describes a prior art framer.
HDLC is a commonly used framing protocol. HDLC signals mark an end or beginning of a frame by an open or close frame flag that includes a sequence of six consecutive “1” bits. HDLC framers insert a zero bit after every sequence of five “1” bits of data in order to guarantee the identification of the end frame flag. Typically, framers are also capable of performing additional operations such as performing CRC error correction algorithms. The framing devices of this type can support multiple protocols that are based, but not necessarily so, on HDLC, such as Signaling system No 7, PPP, etc.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,671,223 of Shachar et al., titled “Multichannel HDLC framing/de-framing machine”, which is incorporated herein by reference, provides an example of a prior art framer that uses metadata (such as control information, status information and the like) of various types in order to perform framing and de-framing operations. The metadata of a multi channel transmitter can include global (relevant to all channels) parameters, channel specific parameters, channel buffer descriptors and the like. Data can be stored in buffers that are pointed by pointers within buffer descriptors.
Modern communication devices are required to operate at ever growing rates. Various processing components such as framers are required to operate more quickly. One way of increasing the throughput of framers is to duplicate them, but this is a costly solution.
There is a need to provide efficient methods for performing framing operations and to provide efficient devices that have framing capabilities.